Anything exciting going on in your field of work this year? Or breakthroughs in science, new technologies developed, things like that.
We started deploying malaria vaccines!
The end-of-year numbers aren’t in yet, but 2023 should be the year that wind and solar finally generate more electricity than coal here in the US.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/BTL/2023/02-genmix/article.phpFor new generation projects coming online in 2023, 86% of the electricity is from non-fossil sources. The generation capacity that was retired in 2023 was all fossil based.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1304-august-21-2023-2023-non-fossil-fuel-sources-will-account-86-newWow that’s pretty great.
I thought you guys were on par with Australia but in fact you’re making us look bad - that’s great.
The first CRISPR gene editing treatment for sickle cell disease was approved. An amazing start to what I hope is a future of cures for various genetic diseases.
The FDA also approved the world’s first RSV vaccine. If you’ve noticed a lot of ad-campaigns for it this year, that’s why.
Dracunculiasis (disease caused by Guinea worm infection in humans) is almost eradicated. We hit a new all-time low for known cases: 13 last year, and now only 3 in the first half of 2023.
We are getting very close to approval of Melanoma vaccines. https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/14/health/moderna-merck-melanoma-vaccine-immunotherapy/index.html
For those not aware, Melanomas are not only one of the deadliest and most common cancers, it isn’t really very treatable with chemotherapies or radiation. And yes, Fuck cancer - we’re coming for you, bitch!
Kissinger’s death primarily.
I have been really appreciating open source software this year. I always preferred FOSS over the alternatives (Firefox, Thunderbird, Libre Office etc) but I tried to use it for as much as I could this year, even professionally.
Haven’t bootet into my Windows partition with Adobe Cloud for months now, it’s almost exclusively Inkscpape, Scribus, Blender and Krita on Fedora and I love it! I’m also slowly, slowly getting into Godot which seems like another piece of amazing software.
Sure there are some (very) rough edges here and there and I will have fire up Illustrator or Unity (🤢) at some point when clients demand it but I’m pretty amazed at how well it’s going.
Welp, sending this is totally gonna jinx it but whatevs 😘
The other day I was trying to get an empty vr project to run in unity. After half a day I just gave up. There’s just so many options and packages and license agreements. I’m gonna switch to Godot and Steam index. Even if it’s a lot of work I know I can share it with others.
China’s carbon emissions are now entering structural decline thanks to the massive push in renewables and nuclear https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carbon-emissions-set-for-structural-decline-from-next-year
